Nanocelebrity

My friends catfishvegas and kdotdammit have already spilled the legumes on this one, but I thought I'd better wait until the new Tucson Weekly was officially live before directing you to my presence within its pages. Thanks to the graciousness of music writer Annie Holub, I have become the latest individual subjected to "Nine Questions." Not only that, I'm sporting my best deranged rabbinical student look, from a self-portrait taken this past winter, when I was beset with maleficient maladies. I'm hoping that even those of you who know me well will be surprised -- whether pleasantly or not -- with some of my responses. I'm not going to tell you how long I held that proverbial gun to my head for the final question, but rest assured that I gave it tremendous thought.

I'm happy with my choice of the 2-CD reissue of Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted as my favorite album of all time. Runners-up included two other Pavement albums, The Beatles' Revolver (which would have annoyed Steven no end), Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, The Cure's Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Wilco's Being There, The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet, Prince's 1999, and -- I almost picked this one in Joel's honor -- Fleetwood Mac's Rumors. There would have been something from Joy Division and New Order in the list of finalists as well, but I'd want a greatest hits selection from either band and felt that, while I could cheat a little by picking an expanded reissue, I couldn't cheat a lot by opting for something that was never released as an album. Besides, if I started going down the greatest hits path, I would have to have thrown in The Clash. And if I'd thrown in The Clash, I would have to have thrown in Buddy Holly. And if I'd thrown in Buddy Holly, I would have to have thrown in Elvis. How does that children's book go? "If you give a mouse a cookie..."

Conversely

There's a place on my right foot where the little toe rubs against a shoe designed for something more narrow. It's telling me what I did today and the day before and the day before that, performing a ritual I don't fully understand, a promise to myself to remember: the more things change, the more they stay the same. And that's clearly what I'm after, stasis through motion. If I can't stop the tide, I might as well become it. It matters, too, that I'm forsaking my principles along the way. I once insisted we buy a car made by workers who not only made good wages but also received three times the paid vacation of ones in my own country. Now I'm fixated on a brand that burns its betrayal and my own into the flesh of a mind that hasn't been properly hardened to the excess that makes commodities glow like teenagers in love. That mark I see everywhere, aware that it stands for a love divided from me, but still pursuing it with the tenacity of the protagonist who spies muted horns all over California. I'm bound to a post I should probably abandon, sure only that the dampening throb in my foot is a feeling I'm too fearful to forsake.

Last night I watched bits of silent film saved from the ravages of insufficient adoration: a shot tracking for what seems like miles through a factory in Pennsylvania; a preview for the first film based on The Great Gatsby that now serves only to review a loss we can't make good; and dark-skinned men and women from far below the Mason-Dixon Line, recorded by the camera of a graduate student named Zora Neale Hurston. The only link between the items in this collection is that they survived a tide that washed most things out to sea. But I see everything fitting together in an implacable grid. The factory has moved to China. The newly rich spend their money taking the depth out of their lives, buying up everything from flat-panel televisions to fatless portable music players. And the young people smiling in a semi-circle, diffused by the dust of a South covered by the kudzu of Wal-Mart and Nascar but still living a deathly existence beneath it, are wearing the same sneakers you can purchase off the Converse website, the distinctive shape burnished with the blister-making pressure of nostalgia. I am well-versed in this con game, seeking myself in the labor of others. I know that I'm being played. But I stay on the court anyway.

The Gender of Modernism

While wandering the aisles of the Barnes & Noble at Foothills Mall this evening, on a trip undertaken with a single purpose -- to check the pagination of my Scribner's edition of The Great Gatsby against the one on the shelves -- that morphed, predictably, into something less telic, I found an impressive selection of books on the $1 table, including a collection of black-and-white photos from Law & Order crime scenes that is far better than I imagined and the latest collection from Arizona author Charles Bowden. The big score, though, was a copy of Mina Loy's The Lost Lunar Baedeker that was inexplicably priced below $1. I already have my own, but how could I pass up a copy of the only available book by one of the most inventive Modernists? I'm sure I can find a worthy recipient for this discovery.

In the meantime, I was inspired by a few minutes of reading Loy to pull my H.D.: Collected Poems, 1912-1944 off the shelf. Although less blatantly experimental than Loy, H.D. interests me just as much and frequently excites me more. The fact that she hailed from the same town where my mother grew up, just west of my birthplace and just north of where I passed the first decade of my own life, increases the attraction. Some people find H.D. excessively precious, but she is the perfect match for my aesthetic sensibility. Take this poem from her 1921 book Hymen, which is a particularly strong collection:

She Rebukes Hippolyta

Was she so chaste?

Swift and a broken rock
clatters across the steep shelf
of the mountain slope,
sudden and swift
and breaks as it clatters down
into the hollow breach
of the dried water-course:
far and away
(through fire I see it,
and smoke of the dead, withered stalks
of the wild cistus-bush)
Hippolyta, frail and wild,
galloping up the slope
between great boulder and rock
and group and cluster of rock.

Was she so chaste,
(I see it, sharp, this vision,
and each fleck on the horse's flanks
of foam, and bridle and bit,
silver, and the straps,
wrought with their perfect art,
and the sun,
striking athwart the silver-work,
and the neck, strained forward, ears alert,
and the head of a girl
flung back and her throat.)

Was she so chaste--
(Ah, burn my fire, I ask
out of the smoke-ringed darkness
enclosing the flaming disk
of my vision)
I ask for a voice to answer:
was she chaste?

Who can say--
the broken ridge of the hills
was the line of a lover's shoulder,
his arm-turn, the path to the hills,
the sudden leap and swift thunder
of mountain boulders, his laugh.

She was mad--
as no priest, no lover's cult
could grant madness;
the wine that entered her throat
with the touch of the mountain rocks
was white, intoxicant:
she, the chaste,
was betrayed by the glint
of light on the hills,
the granite splinter of rocks,
the touch of the stone
where heat melts
toward the shadow-side of the rocks.

I mean, goddamn that's powerful writing. And the whole book is filled with similarly awesome compositions. H.D. manages to redream the classical world with the same intensity as Pound or Eliot, but with more economy, more focus, and way more sex than either of those two masters. Maybe her aspirations are not as lofty. But as Kim would say, "An 'asm' is preferable to an 'ism' any day."